EMC mentioned this schedule on their public earnings call, repeated it in discussions with Enterprise Storage Forum, and corporate PR confirmed it to me this morning. FAST is, if you will excuse the pun, fast-approaching!

There’s actually a very-significant difference between FAST versions 1 and 2:

• FAST version 1 (coming in December 2009) can automatically migrate an entire LUN between tiers of storage on the Symmetrix V-Max based on access patterns. This is a nice-to-have feature, but does not yet live up to the promise of automated tiered storage, as pioneered by Compellent and offered in various forms by many other storage companies. I am told that FAST version 1 also does not support virtually-provisioned (thin) volumes. Although FAST will make it much easier to take advantage of solid state flash drives (EFDs to EMC), it will do nothing to improve utilization.
• FAST version 2 (coming in May mid-2010?) will automatically move smaller sub-LUN pieces of storage between tiers of storage, and will reportedly support virtual provisioning. It is likely that FAST would use the same extent size supported by virtual provisioning, which is 12 tracks or 768 KB. The combination of virtual provisioning and fully-automated storage tiering will finally EMC the ammunition they need to defend their turf against smaller challengers when it comes to these sticky technical features.

So there you have it. EMC V-Max gets FAST in December 2009 and May mid-2010! Now how about a schedule for geo-distributed clustering?

Update: Fixed two typos above. I wrote “May 2009″ instead of “May 2010″. You should see my checkbook!

Note: Although Lou Przystas told Enterprise Storage Forum that FAST V2 would come in May, EMC has apparently not set a hard date and are saying “mid-2010″ at this point. Even this is an aggressive ship date, but I won’t say EMC missed it unless we haven’t got it by the end of summer!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | EMC V-Max FAST: Coming in December … And 2010!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Everything, Gestalt IT, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Paul goes on to quote me, saying I “didn’t think primary data de-duplication technology was ready for prime time just yet.” I absolutely did say these words, but I am not sure if my point came across.

I’ve recently expounded about the benefits of deduplication technology, but have warned that it might not be all it’s cracked up to be in primary storage environments. By “primary” I mean those storage environments serving mission-critical applications. Although dedupe works great for backup and archiving, the random I/O, low latency, and high throughput of primary storage (and especially virtualized servers) might be too much for current systems. And as of now, only NetApp, Riverbed (soon), and startups greenBytes (see my story) and Ocarina (more on them another time) were willing to go on record with me as supporting deduplication of primary storage.

So what I meant was that deduplication is not yet ready for prime time in primary storage applications. No one should hesitate to use the technology for backup or archiving at this point, but make sure you do a thorough evaluation of the specific product you are selecting to make sure it delivers the performance you require!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Is Deduplication Ready for Prime Time?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.